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If we draw something like an air-field on sand, it is reasonable to believe that the planes will start to land again...

Sounds like that "cargo cult" variety of science.


So your argument is that if someone believes something to be reasonable, he is wrong because there exists some other unrelated non-reasonable beliefs?


I'm pretty old myself, started coding with Commodore Pet, 16Kb of memory, C-casette for mass memory. Cost something like $1000 at a time.

You can still do somewhat impressive things yourself because the tools have gotten so much better. One thing I've been stringing along the years is a sokobon puzzle game called Robo-E. I've now implemented it in Java ME (originally for Nokia J2ME phones with 64Kb of memory), then in Javascript + C++ for symbian and Meego, now in Objective-C + C++ for iOS. The iOS version is 17Mb, compared to 48Kb of the original J2ME version, so it is over 300 times bigger just because tools, and hardware has gotten so much more capable.

Modelling tools, programming tools, everything is just so much more capable of nowadays.

Sorry for rambling, I guess I'm getting old :)


Exercise is a chemical intervention. It is not a panacea and it will take time, typically weeks before it has a significant effect, but it does have an effect. The body is the temple of the soul, you should not ignore either.


I had something similar in my home network, but my network foo is not good enough and I did not have to time to debug for days and weeks.

Basically one linux box with NVidia embedded gigabit controller could take down the whole segment. It would only happen after a random period, like after days when the box was busy. No two machines connected to the same switch would be able to ping each other any more after that. I suspected the switch, bad cables, etc. In the end I successfully circumvented the problem by buying a discrete gigabit ethernet card for the server in question.


Petitions are like polls. And politicians certainly follow polls.

Big ships turn slowly, some patience is required to see the effect of steering. Many changes in society look quick and immediate only when clouded by the shortened perspective of looking tens or hundreds of years back in the history.


Reading https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget it seems he was thinking of suicide already many years ago.


Well, GDP/capita in Slovakia is quite a bit lower than in France or Sweden, and that is a common trait across Eastern Europe. As he is asking for hosting, money enters the equation.


As a European myself, I think it is fine to generalize* about Europe. Many points in Varsavsky's blog post were correct and it raised awareness of some things to consider. Sure, it had its omissions and errors, but also remember it was a blog post, not an article in a peer reviewed journal. Reading the article + the ensuing hacker news discussion one is already much better informed.

What is naive is to expect some blog post to give you an overarching view of a very complex subject. Kind of like reading a wikipedia article something and expecting to be expert on the subject matter after that.

*Making generalizations is a wonderful property of the human brain. Without that we'd all be lost in the fractal complexity of everyday detail.


> Making generalizations is a wonderful property of the human brain. Without that we'd all be lost in the fractal complexity of everyday detail.

Sure - the problem is when the generalizations are so broad as to become complete falsehoods. If I went to Upper East Side in New York and concluded that Americans are extremely wealthy persons who live in townhouses, I would be incorrect.


In my opinion Varsavsky's blog post was ok. Sure it mostly covered Spain and France, but that's where he's worked at. It conveyed actual experience from one person's perspective.

Some responsibility always lies with the reader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_reading


That's like saying that it's alright if I write a blog post about how all Americans drive Chevrolets, and then it's up to the reader to figure out the truth by applying critical reading.

While the reader should apply critical reading, the writer should certainly make sure his facts are straight.


Indeed, many who extol the virtues of cloud computing somehow have a blind spot to the fact that network coverage on this globe is not even. Actually it would be nice to see a color coded world map of network strength, is there one?

Bad network coverage is a problem that can be addressed many ways. Shameless plug: I've been working on offline wikipedia that by its nature is always available and fast, everywhere: http://mpaja.com/mopedi I'm sure there are many unexplored niches where the cpu power in your hand can be put to good use without needing the network.


Prisoners in the US serving lifetime without parole: 41000, prisoners in the UK serving lifetime without parole: 41

When imprisoning people so easily is the new normal, it is no wonder the public is not so alert about new laws.


Did you take into account the population difference between the two countries ?


Population of the United Kingdom: 61 million Population of the United States: 315 million

He's saying there's a thousand times as many lifetime inmates, but only 5 times the population. It's still a huge number.


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